SOURCE: "Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 123-57.

In the essay below, Skinner examines the values and conventions that characterized Renaissance discussions of political theory in order to determine the Utopia's place in that discussion and to argue that the work is More's vision of a "best commonwealth".

Almost everything about More's Utopia is debatable, but at least the general subject-matter of the book is not in doubt. More announces his theme on the title page, which reads: De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. His concern, that is, is not merely or even primarily with the new island of Utopia; it is with 'the best state of a commonwealth'.

To say that this is More's concern is at once to raise what has always...